When fire hoses are used to fight a fire, they must be washed and dried before they are rolled up for storage. A number of devices have heretofore been used for drying hoses. One approach, as exemplified by the patent to Ferguson, U.S. Pat. No. 1,897,248, involved installing a support on the top roof of a fire house. Then a pulley was mounted on the support. A cable passed over the pulley with the ends reaching the ground. One end of the cable was attached to one end of a fire hose. Then a person on the ground pulled the other end of the cable. In this way, the fire hose could be pulled upward until the upper end was high enough so a person on the roof could lift the upper end of the hose off the pulley and suspend it on the arms of the support, leaving the remaining portion of the fire hose to hang vertically. Then the person on the roof moved the pulley so that another hose could be pulled upwards to rest on other arms of the support at the top of the fire house.
This structure was objectionable because it required two men to hang each fire hose, one on the ground to hoist the fire hose to the roof of the fire house, and the other on the roof to remove the hose from the hoist and install it on the arms of the support. This was a somewhat dangerous procedure because it required a person, usually a fireman, on the roof, to extend a part of his body over the edge of the roof in order to disconnect the end of the fire hose from the pulley and to suspend the fire hose on to the arms of the support. This danger was substantially magnified in climates where the roof of the fire house was covered with snow and ice, making it slippery. Furthermore, the hoses had to be separately raised and hung, and afterwards, separately removed. This was time consuming. In addition, because the length of each fire hose is fifty feet, the roof of the fire house had to be at least fifty feet high, which added to the danger to the person on the roof. In situations where the roof of a fire house was too low, expensive scaffolding was required to provide the required height, and this was expensive.
Another approach, as exemplified by the patent to Fishbourne, utilized a dual rack arrangement. The racks comprised a plurality of slats and one rack could be elevated with respect to the other. In operation, one portion of a fire hose was laid on the upper rack and then the rack was raised and the remaining portion of the fire hose was folded down over the upper rack and laid on the lower rack. In this way, a number of fire hoses could be dried simultaneously by laying the hoses parallel to each other on the slats of the rack.
This arrangement was objectionable because the drying racks utilized a great deal of ground or floor space because the hoses, for the most part, were laid out generally horizontally. However, space is expensive and not always available. Furthermore, the hoses to be dried had to be carefully laid on the upper rack in spaced parallel relationship to each other. This was not easy to do when the hoses were stiff because of exposure to low temperatures. Under such circumstances, the hoses had to be placed in a building where they could be warmed to restore their flexibility. Then the upper rack had to be raised and the remaining part of the fire hose also had to be folded over the upper rack and laid in parallel relationship to each other on the lower rack. This was too time consuming to be practical.
In this invention, the disadvantages of the prior art devices for drying fire hoses are overcome in that the mid-point of the hoses to be dried are draped over pegs on the rack and the rack is then raised, leaving the two half portions of each hose to hang vertically. Since the hoses hang vertically from pegs, the horizontal space required to dry the hoses using the present invention is only a small fraction of the space required by the Fishbourne approach and the present invention requires only one man to dry the hoses. This is in contrast to the Ferguson structure which requires two men to operate.
What is needed, therefore, and comprises an important object of this invention, is to provide a rack for drying hoses which requires a comparatively small amount of floor space and which can be operated by only one man.